In a cellular wireless access system making use of a reuse-1 resource allocation plan, transmissions to and from users located at a cell edge typically result in more interference than transmissions to and from users located at cell centers. The throughput of users at cell edges is usually less than the average cell throughput due to factors such as large path loss and interference mitigation techniques such as fractional power control.
A commonly used solution to this problem is known as Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR). In a FFR system, a radio frequency band of a cell may be divided into a number of subbands, for example, three. One of three neighbor cells uses one of the subbands to schedule its cell edge users (CEU) and uses the other two subbands to schedule its cell center users (CCU), with all of the three subbands operating on reuse-1, i.e., neighbor cells use the same resources for their own users.